FROM

Much of the information in this essay about
environmentalists comes from Anna Peterson’s Being
Animal

Image from greenoverdose.com

Ever since my eyes were opened to the perilous condition of our planet as a
result of reading a 1985 essay called “The Defense of the Peaceable Kingdom”
by a Quaker scientist, I have been concerned about environmental issues,
taking what small actions I could think of of to keep a light tread on the
earth. My chief concern was the liberation of animals, but it seemed
overwhelmingly obvious to me that any sane and mature person would care
about the danger haunting the earth as well; this is, after all, our only
home, as well as the home of many other beings, and it would be madness to
stand by idly until it dies in a largely human-caused apocalypse. We can’t
assume it’s too late; it’s worth working at. Saving the earth and saving
its abused animal inhabitants seemed two parts of the same goal.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, a couple in our Quaker Meeting gave a very
knowledgeable presentation on the environmental crisis, suggesting other
actions one could take. It was evident they cared greatly. I was impressed
by their erudition and their suggestions, and ready to come aboard with
them. They knew that I was encouraging Friends to adopt a nonviolent way of
eating, and I knew that they were meat eaters, but I naively thought the
prospect of an enthusiastic supporter for the cause of the earth would be
enough to induce them to at least modify their stance and support my
Concern, if not go completely vegetarian themselves. After all, they would
surely agree that the earth needs all the help it can get. But I couldn’t
have been more wrong; apparently my vegan message made me persona non grata,
for I got the cold shoulder in more ways than one. It was the beginning of
my education in the unfortunate tensions between many animal advocates and
earth advocates.

Fast-forward to 2014. Livestock’s Long Shadow, the lengthy report by the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which concluded that
animal ag contributed 18% of the greenhouse gases causing climate
change--more than all forms of transportation together--had been out for
eight years. Available for five years was “Livestock and Climate Change,”
(See
“Climate Change”), a (much shorter) report by Robert Goodland and Jeff
Anhang published by the WorldWatch Institute, which analyzed the FAO report
and pointed out that when fish-farming (as source of animal feed),
deforestation for pasture, transportation of animal products, and other
factors are included, the percentage of greenhouse gases from animal ag is
actually much higher, about 51%. Now the case for dropping animal products
for the sake of the earth was suddenly considerably stronger, and even the
reluctant Al Gore went veg. The percentages of meat and dairy sold in the
US also went down, not because of a substantial jump in the number of
vegetarians and vegans, but apparently because many omnivores are now eating
several meatless meals each week.

But no one saw crowds of environmentalists climbing onto the vegan
bandwagon. Their major organizations--Sierra Club, Rainforest Action
Network, Greenpeace, Oceania, and others--mention the issue on their
websites, but the information is kept in the background; they urge
supporters to take action to oppose harmful activities such as fracking and
oil drilling in the Arctic, but there are no campaigns to urge (or even
encourage) the public to drop animal products from their diets. Not only
that--when the makers of the 2014 film Cowspiracy interviewed spokespersons
of the groups and asked about their response to the evidence for the looming
threat posed by animal agriculture, they got mostly evasions. It seems
likely that these nonprofit groups don’t care to risk their funding by
promoting so extreme a measure as vegetarianism, let alone veganism.

Worldviews in Tension

Some of the tension between environmentalists and animal activists stems
from partially conflicting worldviews. Many environmentalists (though not
all) hold variants of a holistic, ecocentric worldview expressed in the
classic Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold, set forth in an essay in his 1949 book A
Sand Country Almanac. The two main principles of this ethic are that nature
is not merely the human context, providing useful resources for us, but has
value in and of itself; and that value is found in the whole, the ecological
community. Individual beings, including animals, have value in proportion
to their contribution to the health of the whole community, but not in and
of themselves; they are expendable (and edible). Human beings are not the
lords of this community as they have long assumed, but citizens of it, and
responsible to other citizens for the welfare of the community.

The implications of this message are many. There is no doubt that humans
have indeed been acting like lords--or rather tyrants--over the earth,
recklessly taking out whatever they want, destroying habitats, decimating
crucial ecosystems, fostering dangerous climate change, until “the earth
withers . . . the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants, for they have .
. . broken the everlasting covenant,” as Isaiah prophetically wrote three
thousand years ago. It is desperately important that politicians and the
wealthy lords of industry hear and heed this message, and accept their
responsibility as mere citizens among other citizens of many shapes and
varieties. But few are eager to do so.

To some extent the message is being heard, for many ordinary people are
speaking up by vote and by protest against destructive industrial policies.
But it is always a struggle between self-serving forces and those serving
the earth. And, unfortunately, certain elements of some environmentalists’
message hinder their effectiveness. One of them, as Anna Peterson
(pictured) points out in Being Animal, is a negative outlook on companion
animals. Environmentalists who make it clear that they consider wild
animals to be the only true animals, domesticated ones being so denatured as
to no longer be worthy of the name, do themselves no favor with large swaths
of the public, including many animal activists, who love their cats, dogs,
or other animals-in-residence and consider them members of their family. To
the extent that the environmentalists’ objections are to the destructive and
unhealthy pet food industry, they have a very valid point, to which animal
companion guardians (including myself) have no satisfactory answer. But
condemning animal friends is not the way to help the earth.

Worldviews Colliding

Another difficulty, and a serious point of disagreement between
environmentalists and animal activists is that while the latter consider the
violence of predation as tragic, many of the former affirm it as good,
because it is a crucial part of the valuable whole. Like the two Quakers
who wanted nothing to do with my vegan message, they not only believe in
eating flesh (from ecologically responsible farms), some practice hunting so
long as the prey is from a species that is overabundant in a particular
area, believing that it deepens their participation in nature. Furthermore,
they hold that culling--that is, killing--large numbers of a species that is
invasive, and/or throwing a local ecosystem out of balance, is the
responsible thing to do.

While removing invasive plants is not likely to lead to major contention,
killing animals because there are too many of them for sustainability does
have serious consequences. One is practical: the animals may increase
their reproduction rate to compensate for the losses (as humans did in the
Baby Boom after 1945), so that the horror and bloodshed will have been for
nothing. In the case of some species, there may be harmful repercussions
for the survivors; for example, elephants who as infants endured the
massacre of their mothers and extended families show signs of post-traumatic
stress disorder and may become violent and dangerous.

Humans simply do not know all the results of their actions; as Tolkien says,
“Even the wise cannot see all ends.” If, as we at the Peaceable Table and
many others hold, all beings are so deeply linked that what happens to one
affects all, the violence of any massacre pervades and pollutes earth’s
spiritual atmosphere, fostering further violence elsewhere.

Violent
solutions to animal overpopulation tend to be the first to come to many
people’s minds, but nonviolent solutions, such as birth control, can be
sought and found. Another example: when the area threatened by an imbalance
of animals is delimited, the animals can be moved, as took place 1999 - 2000
when animal advocates cooperated with environmentalists to move invasive
wild goats living on Catalina Island near the coast of Southern California.
(Unhappily, after the airlift took many of the goats to a safe new
location, the Conservancy that owned much of the island was unwilling to
wait for further fundraising, and began killing the remaining goats).

From the viewpoint of consistency and thus integrity, the most serious
problem of the massacre solution is the unhappy fact that the animal species
whose numbers are most out of control, who are doing what may be fatal
damage to the whole biosphere of the planet, is, alas, so-called homo
sapiens. We have met the enemy, and it is us. But scarcely anyone wants to
be an ecofascist who advocates mass killing of human beings to save the
earth; not only is this counter-intuitive, it is, to say the least, very
unpopular. (Deep ecologists, especially members of the group Earth First!,
are thought to favor this solution; there is a single pseudonymous 1987
essay tentatively exploring the idea that the deaths of many humans would be
beneficial, but most of the group’s members do not support the idea.)

Thus, for ecocentrists, the value of all animals in all species is
subordinated to the welfare of the whole community, and they can be killed
when their numbers threaten that welfare--all species, that is, except us
human animals, who happen to be the worst offenders! It does seem a little
ironic, then, that humans should appoint themselves the killers of other
overpopulated animal species. It is true that when particular ecological
problems have been created by humans, humans ought to try to resolve those
problems; but the means should be of the sort we would want applied to
ourselves.

Hope is the Thing With Feathers

But not all environmentalists are ecocentrists, as many readers know; there
are other positions, most of them happily compatible with animal advocacy.
Some are anthropocentric, primarily motivated by a desire to save the earth
for future generations of human beings. Some are theocentric, holding that
the earth and all beings in it belong to God, who has appointed humans as
stewards or guardians; thus we humans do have a special status among other
species, but it is one of caretaking, not exploitation. Some, especially
ecofeminists, emphatically reject the dualisms of human culture vs. nature,
male vs. female, whole vs. individual that are typical of much traditional
Western thought, and the patterns of domination that these dualisms foster,
domination that ravishes the land and thoughtlessly or deliberately kills
millions of animals. Some environmentalists, particularly certain Quakers,
affirm that the earth and all its beings are indwelt by an immanent divine
Light/Presence, so that they are owed respect, even reverence, both as a
whole and as individuals. There are some influenced by Buddhism who hold
that all beings are one, their separateness essentially unreal like the
ephemeral waves of the ocean, so that when our eyes are opened, we see
ourselves in every being, and consequently live and act with compassion for
all. And, of course, several of these categories overlap; e.g., a person
can be a Quaker or Buddhist of evangelical Christian ecofeminist.

These positions face both theoretical and practical problems, just as
ecocentric environmentalism does; most readers know them already. Briefly,
the main theoretical one is that when both the whole and the individuals are
to be held in respect or reverence, there is little inherent guidance about
how to deal with situations when the welfare of two communities or
individuals conflict. Two practical problems faced by animal advocates in
particular--whether they are also environmentalists or not--are: first, that
our vegan message seems ascetic and depriving to most people, who continue
to cling to meat and dairy; and, second, that, thanks in part to the media,
vocal animal defenders full of anger tend to capture the public’s attention
much more than advocates who seek to deliver the message with compassion for
all, so that people get the impression that we are judgmental and hostile,
making them feel ill-used and defensive.

Can’t We Get Along?

One hopeful possibility--a very large area in which all animal advocates and
environmentalists can agree and work together--is that the huge factory farm
and slaughterhell system is an abomination in every way--exploiting and
often injuring vulnerable workers, undermining consumers’ health, creating
hells for animals, and wreaking unimaginable harm on the earth through
extinctions, pollution, and climate change. It must be nonviolently
dismantled. It is useless to expect any leadership toward this goal from
government agencies designed to protect human health or the earth; the only
way it will happen is for people to to be effectively persuaded to stop
buying the products. In addition to the important work animal advocates are
already doing, we could join major environmental organizations and pressure
them from within to start speaking up--loudly--about the terrible peril this
evil system poses to the earth. Wealthy donors can have particular
influence here, but many people with shallower pockets might help convince
one or more of the big earth-defending nonprofits to put their mouth where
their money (supplemented by our contributions) is.

Imagine, for example, the HSUS, PETA, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club
joining forces to press the message home: if you want to do what will help
most to promote compassion for animals and prevent our planet-home from
becoming a dead world, swear off meat and dairy (especially) and eggs from
factory farms. Such a major cooperative effort would mean both sides
learning to tolerate certain views and actions they find hard to take. But
things might really begin to move.

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